Monday, July 2, 2018

Paul Berman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hamas

Paul Berman, writing for tabletmag.com, lauds Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez for momentously beating Joe Crowley in the primary for House seat
in NYC's 14th district. He does so while crediting Crowley, first of all, for a
fine Bronx accent, and beyond that for being a consistently liberal pol
throughout his career. Berman credits Ocasio-Cortez both for her savory Bronx
intonations and beyond that for an insurgent politics whose time has come.

Berman also manages to gently upbraid Ocasio-Cortez for her
views on Israel. It matters that the upbraiding is gentle and therefore far
from the hysteria all too often occasioned by this subject, and also that it
occurs in Tablet.

Tablet (tabletmag.com), in the nine years of its existence,
has established itself as a site for quality material on Jewish life and
history but also, increasingly, and without redress, for an ugly, sneering tilt
toward rightwing Zionism. This takes the form of jeering at those who still
maintain some vestige of belief that a peace movement in Israel is necessary,
and that a two-state solution, despite all manner of impediments, remains a
viable goal, given, among other things, the utter lack of any sane outcome.

Given the venomous baseline of Tablet's tried and true house
polemicists, Berman's rebuke of Ocasio-Cortez comes as a balm.

Ocasio-Cortez is opposed to what she sees as Israeli
brutality toward Gaza protestors, and has voiced deep concerns about the
humanitarian disaster of life in Gaza that provides the awful, ongoing context
for these protests. Though others at Tablet might sneer at Ocasio-Cortez's
expressions of sympathy, let it be said that Berman does not.

It's only when she compares the Gaza protestors to
"civil-rights protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and to protesting
schoolteachers in West Virginia," that Berman dissents, again, softly.
Such protests have the tradition of the American civil rights movement behind
them, and the likes of Martin Luther King for inspiration. Protestors in Gaza,
on the other hand, suffer and are bedeviled by a leadership consisting of
Hamas.

Perhaps, Berman muses, Ocasio-Cortez will at same point look
into the Hamas charter and articulate key distinctions for herself. For now,
though much has been made of her membership in Democratic Socialists of
America, she has not echoed the slogan adopted by some members at their last
convention: “From the River to the Sea/ Palestine will be free!”

Whether chanted by members of DSA or Hamas, it means not
only no peace with Israel, but no Israel altogether. It bespeaks a politics of stupefying
and suicidal bent, the unhappy politics of Hamas. If you live in Gaza, the
disaster land where Hamas rules, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are
holy writ,enshrined in the Hamas
charter, you may have no choice but to adopt and march under the banner of such
views. To live in the United States, and, as a member of DSA or in some other
context, echo these views means you don't mind furthering anti-Semitism.

Berman underlines the fact that no matter the depths of her
outrage at the situation of Gaza, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not collapsed
into this aspect of DSA/Hamas politics.

Leaving Berman behind, I think of Ocasio-Cortez as a sane
lefty/liberal/progressive, one who hasn’t crumbled into one or another of the
pitfalls of the left, which happen to be, too often, some version or another of
renascent and reconfigured anti-Semitism.